Honouring our war heroes or honouring war? Well-being in contemporary Australian war fiction for children and adolescents

War, like other stressful situations and experiences, entails a threat to one’s subjective well-being, and war fiction for children represents this threat in different ways: some narratives minimise it, and others do not. War fiction, then, provides material for a case study of war and its impact on representations of subjective well-being (SWB), and how this is communicated to children in the stories they read. This article examines representations of SWB in the context of Australia’s involvement in World War I in two recently published picture books: Midnight: The Story of a Light Horse (2014) by Mark Greenwood and Frané Lessac and One Minute’s Silence (2014) by David Metzenthen and Michael Camilleri. These picture books invite young readers into conflicting views of war and its impact on SWB. On the one hand, in Midnight schemas and scripts construct the belief that war is a glorious event that has a positive impact on SWB. On the other hand, in One Minute’s Silence schemas and scripts challenge the view that war is a viable means of solving national problems and enhancing SWB, and remembers its war heroes as tragic participants in a violent and senseless war.